The Ambedkar Age Digital Bookmobile | Smita Rajmane & Somnath Waghmare
The Ambedkar Age Digital Bookmobile is coming to FICA!
In 2019, Smita Rajmane and Somnath Waghmare were awarded the FICA Public Art Grant for their proposal to harness Maharashtra’s long history of social reform, accessing 400-500 year-old traditions of song-writing and performances against caste-based exploitation and untouchability. Emphasising histories of anti-caste resistance and their relevance today, their project, the Ambedkar Age Digital Bookmobile, took shape as a sustained engagement with awareness-building and documentation around contemporary Dalit popular and political song-performances within the community.
Despite the exigencies and restrictions of the pandemic, the project grew to encompass discussions, dialogues and some wonderfully rich encounters with singers and anti-caste traditions across Maharashtra. We are pleased to finally be welcoming the Ambedkar Age Digital Bookmobile to Project_Space at the FICA Reading Room where it will be hosted from 22 July to 20 August 2022, along with a significant portion of Smita and Somnath’s extensive research around the same.
The project will also travel to a variety of public spaces as it is imagined as a portable multi-media archive with the potential to navigate spaces and distances with economy. We are excited to witness and participate in the new avenues of understanding and meaning taking shape around the Bookmobile and its documentation of such ephemeral elements of performance and songs.
The display with the Ambedkar Age Digital Bookmobile opened at 6 PM on Friday, 22 July at Project_Space at the FICA Reading Room, with a live performance of Ambedkarite anti-caste songs by Rekha Bharti ani Sanch from Aurangabad, Maharashtra.
Rekha Bharti ani Sanch | A live Ambedkarite anti-caste songs performance
The opening weekend of the Ambedkar Age Digital Bookmobile at Project_Space at the FICA Reading Room included a live Ambedkarite anti-caste songs performance by Rekha Bharti ani Sanch from Aurangabad, Maharashtra. Rekha Bharti started her musical career at the age of eight, singing the songs of famed Ambedkarite musician Wamandada Kardak. She joined the company of the famous poet Vijayanand Jadhav from Aurangabad and started singing Bhimgeet. She started a group called ‘Vamanacha Jatha’ with twenty five other people. As part of this, she used to sing songs of Babasaheb, Savitribai Phule, Jyotirao Phule and Gautam Buddha. Rekha ji developed her own singing style and she now sings in the Qawwali form. Her gurus founded a very famous and renowned party called ‘Milind Singing Party.' She established the Rekha Bharti Ani Saanch Party in 1991. As part of this event, Rekha ji was accompanied by the Gautam Avadh on the harmonium and Krushna Samase on the tabla.
Prof Y S Alone | A talk on the significance of Ambedkarite songs in the anti-caste movement
We welcomed Prof. Y. S. Alone to speak on the significance of Ambedkarite songs in the anti-caste movement as part of The Ambedkar Age Digital Bookmobile display. Prof Alone spoke of the centrality of the music in these struggles focusing on the mass following of musicians like Wamandada Kardak.
Prof Urmila Bhirdikar | A presentation on ‘The Performance of Dr Ambedkar’s Thought: Bhimrao Dhondiba Kardak’s Ambedkari Jalsa.’
Prof Urmila Bhirdikar's presentation was an exercise in “listening to” Bhimrao Kardak’s voice and music from the print archive. Drawing upon concepts from sound studies and gender and sexuality studies, Prof Bhirdikar presented Kardak as a unique urban modern subject, and as an effective translator and interpreter of Dr. Ambedkar’s radical philosophy of a just human society, while contextualizing the performance of gender in Jalsa.
